⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️— I am fascinated by astronomy and cosmology and this podcast provides a great review of new developments in these fields along with background information to help the listener understand the context of the new research. I am learning interesting new facts in each episode! Highly recommended!!!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — … the alignment of Chris with Emily is what makes this wonderful. Chris teases out a simple explanation from Emily that is understandable to non-scientists like me, but manages to keep immense detail in to explain in depth the subject of the podcast …

A very special live event from YorNight 2018, the University of York's celebration of research at beautiful King's Manor. We talked about exoplanets — that is, planets around other stars — and Emily shared her top three exoplanets of all time. Chris finished by strapping on a guitar and going all Chris Hadfield with The Exoplanet Song. A wonderful, enthusiastic audience of young and old (many in astro-themed fancy dress for the occasion!) packed out the theatre, asked brilliant questions and cheered along.

We've been so comfortable throwing around facts like "the Sun is 8 light seconds away" and "the nearest star is 4 light years away", it's easy to forget that measuring cosmic distances isn't as simple as pulling out a tape measure. So how *do* you measure how far it is to the moon, or the next star, or a distant galaxy? Emily gives us her top five rungs on the Cosmic Distance Ladder.

Mercury: closest planet to the Sun, a small, uninteresting lump of rock ... or, an enigma, with a strange tidally-locked orbit, a core that's way too big, and a mysterious origin story that astronomers are slowly piecing together. Which is why it's Emily's favourite planet, and why ESA and JAXA are sending the fabulously-named BepiColombo spacecraft to take a closer look.

At the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy lies a super-massive black hole. We know it's there, we can detect its effects on the galaxy and see nearby stars whipping around it at high speed. Last year, a worldwide collaboration of astronomers decided to try to take the first direct image of the black hole, merging telescopes spread across the planet into the equivalent of one giant radio dish. Did they succeed? We're still waiting on that image ...

The Kepler mission found loads of exoplanets, and now astronomers are digging deeper into the data in the search for exo*moons* around those planets. All of which sends Chris and Emily on a deep dive into the detail of definitions: what's a moon, anyway? Do we know what a planet is? Or a star? Do astronomers actually understand anything at all?!